Consumer Psychology

by Brian M Young

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  © The Author(s) 2018

  Brian M. YoungConsumer Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0_9

  9. The Older Child: Becoming a Serious Consumer

  Brian M. Young1

  (1)The Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

  Brian M. Young

  Email: b.m.young@exeter.ac.uk

  Older Children

  For many children the onset or entry point of what I have called being an older child is marked by going to school although some children don’t go at all. Indeed the politics of advantage and disadvantage start affecting the education chances of children from conception onwards but especially at this important juncture in children’s lives despite the good intentions of the United Nations (2017). 1 In more affluent metropolitan areas of the world, many children attend and participate in various educational programmes almost from birth . However most children enter an ecology (see Bronfenbrenner in Chapter 3) which is different from that of home and they have to be socialised within an environment where the norms of behaviour and conduct are perhaps not the same as those in the home . This is not necessarily a problem and knowing that scripts and informal rules for social behaviour can be different in different contexts would in my opinion be an essential part of social intelligence. Although others might want to appeal on the grounds of abuse of integrity and authenticity of one’s self perhaps the goal of the child is to realise that one shows different facets of the self in different social occasions while still maintaining basic values and beliefs and thus ensuring integrity and authenticity. What started off as a very basic understanding of lay psychology at the early age of 1.5 years as shown in Repacholi and Gopnik (1997) will develop throughout the lifespan.

  Consumer Socialisation

  Talk of socialisation however means discussing a core concept in consumer psychology and that is consumer socialisation which as we will see covers pretty much everything that is learnt about living in the commercial world, including financial socialisation as well as I see that as integral to consumption. You might find some of this section opinionated but I make no apologies for that although I hope that I have done justice to the literature. The first definition of consumer socialisation was by Ward (1974) who talked of the processes where young people acquired appropriate relevant knowledge, basic skills and attitudes that were relevant to their role as consumers (op. cit., p. 2) but this merely circumscribes what’s happening and we are none the wiser as to the range of activities that constitute consumption. Financial socialisation is treated better and my interpretation of Danes (1994, p. 128) is that financial socialisation requires one to acquire and develop those values , attitudes, standards, norms, knowledge, and behaviors that would benefit you both financially and as a person. The definition of Hayta (2008, p. 167) is the one I prefer as he emphasises the socialisation process of becoming a consumer by using the idea of harmonisation. This is the process in which the individual learns and changes [my emphasis] attitudes, values and norms as an ongoing process of socialisation to the environment. This is a continuous process and takes into account for example the changes in a home environment as one begins to separate different kinds of rubbish into different sorts of bins. No age limits, which is appropriate for our life-span vision of change and a dynamic of adaptation, which is also in sympathy with the some of the themes in this book. So we have a good definition and the place to start I guess for most socialisation would be the family.

  Families in the twenty-first century across the world come in all shapes and sizes and perhaps the only truth left is the famous first lines of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. However consumer psychologists are less interested in the kind of family, whether it is extended or nuclear, single-parent or not, but more in the kind of parenting that emerges from it. Parenting styles impinge directly in terms of their relative effectiveness on the socialisation of children and the agenda as reflected in research questions asked often seemed to be concerned with how best to bring up children to cope with the risks and dangers of the commercial world. For example, Mikeska , Harrison, and Carlson (2017) in their review of parental style and consumer socialisation , list the various outcome measures in consumer socialisation research (op. cit., p. 246) and we find inter alia child’s weight status, child tobacco use, cell phone use while driving, ‘cyber victimization’, vandalism, drug use, and healthy eating. Even the expression ‘outcome measure’ suggests that that the direction of the traffic of social influence is distinctly one way and the nature of the transactions within families, the arguments, discussions and often messy resolutions are absent and silent in the debate. I welcome any research as long as the authors recognise the strengths and limitations of their approach but it seems to me that more ethnographic observations and analyses of how families decide on various consumption issues such as family holidays or leisure trips need to be done.

  Parenting styles are neatly classified into four by Mikeska et al. (op. cit.) which are located on a 2 by 2 matrix of dimensions called ‘warm-hostile’ and ‘restrictive-permissive’, producing four possible styles which are (gloss is mine): authorita
tive i.e. warm-restrictive (it’s good to do what I tell you); authoritarian i.e. hostile-restrictive (do it or else); indulgent i.e. warm-permissive (do what you want, I trust you); neglecting i.e. hostile-permissive (do what you like, get lost).

  Using a meta-analysis of over 70 studies the authors concluded that the authoritative style of parenting was particularly effective in enhancing positive interactions with the market place and that authoritarians can be effective as well as they state that the children of authoritarians are very more likely to avoid negative consumer socialization experiences (Mikeska et al., p. 253). My own take home message from this authoritative paper is that parents can help children navigate the marketplace by an authoritative (‘do as I say’) style pushing them toward positive consumption experiences with the added threat from authoritarian parental messages and strictures (‘do as I say or else’) enabling them to avoid danger zones. The caveat would be methodological with the need for more observational and detailed studies of the microstructure of different consumption episodes and a note that the meta-analysis is based on self-report data in the main that is obtained in a form suitable for multivariate analysis.

  Ekström (2006) has argued that we should widen the scope of consumer socialisation and extend it in the direction of life-long socialisation and given the aims of this book I would not wish to disagree with this admirable goal . In addition she is well-known for her analysis of reverse socialisation (see for example, Ekström , Tansuhaj, and Foxman, 1987) when the child introduces the older members of the family to the wonderful world of smartphones and social media for example. My own take on this is that there has been a focus on children as neophytes entering the world of buying and selling and it is the job of the parents to socialise them with the emphasis being on producing capable and competent young consumers. If we look at communications within a family and by extension patterns of influence then multiple communications will be occurring in various different ways and this takes place throughout the lifespan. In additions peers such as brothers and sisters and older family members will play different roles and the family is immersed in media communications that promote different brands and styles of consumption . We need methodologies that do justice to this complex web of influence where all parties will participate.

  Financial Socialisation

  Returning to how children learn to use money wisely, we left the pre-schooler with the ability to conserve and also recognising the exchange transactions involved in purchase, but not much else. As much of the development of their understanding of money and how it can be exchanged and stored in different ways will take place in the school years then programmes in financial literacy should provide an opportunity to encourage sensible use and discourage abuse of money. For example in the United States the editorial team of Bannister , Heckman, and Sharkey (2015) have produced National Standards in K-12 Personal Finance Education structured across the school years with six major categories of personal finance instruction (spending and saving, credit and debt, employment and income, investing, risk management and insurance, and financial decision making). There are different standards within each major category and there are different knowledge statements at each of the K, 4, 8, and 12 grades for standards for each major category. For example, in the major category of ‘spending and saving’ we have at standard 1 for K students (5–6-year-olds) there are 9 benchmarks with additional benchmarks to be achieved at grades 4, 8, 12. The 5–6-year-old will then need to be able to (to mention only a few) differentiate between public and private property, explain how receiving a toy as a gift is different from sharing a friend’s toy while playing, and predict possible spending decisions in advance of a family trip or other special occasion.

  Breaking financial literacy down into implementable specified units that are suitable for the classroom is best done with a background of sound research so we know that for example the distinction between public and private property is rooted in appropriate theory and evidence. There is a literature on children’s understanding financial and monetary matters and I shall look at some of that now.

  Money, Money, Money…

  Berti and Bombi (1981) carried out one of the first studies on how children understand money . Working within a Piagetian framework they laid out detailed stages of how the understanding progressed from about 3–8 years of age. The first two stages are an awareness of the context and procedures when people buy things. Money has something to do with buying and selling and then later she understands that you have to pay when you buy although the details of notes, coins, and cards are beyond her. Then she displays awareness that there are some other rules but she doesn’t know them but they’ve probably been cued because there are different kinds of money with different shapes and sizes; until the next stage where the realisation that the money might not be enough to buy some things. When she realises there is one-to-one correspondence between certain coins and the amount of chocolate, this leads to the last stage when the price of the item is understood. Although the account provided by Berti and Bombi follows the Piagetian model in quite a detailed way 2 it was novel at that time. The Piagetian model however does presume children move through different stages and that the development of understanding is driven by mental growth rather than just learning. Berti and Bombi (1988) also explored the child’s understanding of what payment for work is and found a similar pattern of development with preschool children having no idea of where money came from followed by the older children in the next stage who thought the bank gave it to you if you asked for it. This was followed by thinking that the change you got from a transaction in a shop was the origin of money and it was only after that misunderstanding that the final stage emerged of seeing that money is associated with work. Now age bands are missing from this account for the simple reason that research on children’s understanding of banks has been duplicated cross-culturally and although the sequence is similar the age of onset of the different stages varies. For example Hong Kong children sampled by Ng (1985) showed that they had a full understanding of what banks do at 10 years of age and of shop profit by 6 years and similar findings were obtained by Wong (1989). Bonn and Webley (2000) found that unlike children from other cultures who understood that money is printed by either the government of the bank, South African children thought it was printed by God or whites or ‘the boss’.

  The point behind this sampling of fragments of results from different detailed papers on aspects of economic understanding is to demonstrate that a Piagetian model reflecting quasi-logical development across cultures might be relevant for very basic universal processes such as the concept of number or children’s understanding of people’s minds but not for culturally specific concepts where learning how one’s own culture works is important. The observation that South African children had a mistaken view of money supply compared with children in for example Algeria where all the answers from 8 to 14-year-olds referred to government, bank and factory (cited by Bonn & Webley, op. cit., p. 277) is only interesting from the point of view of the education of children in these two places and cannot be attributed to an immature thought process that cannot cope with concepts that refer to social institutions.

  Children and Brands

  As we left the child in infancy and the early preschool period with an object concept (see section “ The Object Concept:​ How Does This Relate to Children’s Understanding of Brands?​”), I’ll pick up the threads from there and continue in this section. There is recognition that here is this packaged thing that appears in the larder, on TV, in the fridge, perhaps in the gutter with discarded litter or broken bottles, or dustbin, and certainly as pristine and attractive objects on the shelves of the supermarket. If we look at the later version 3 of the authoritative reviews by John (1999, 2008) of consumer socialisation , then three to seven years of age is described as the perceptual stage and the child is beginning to recognise, recall and acquire preferences from early in this stage of development. Understanding the symbolic fun
ction in the sense that brand ownership can enhance one’s status among peers and generally add value to your identity comes much later. I recognised this too as the conventional wisdom at that time. However in 2010, McAlister and Cornwell published a significant paper demonstrating that if 3-year-olds were capable of showing they had a basic understanding of other people i.e. had the rudiments of a theory of mind then they were also likely to understand basic brand symbolism . One of the basic elements of this understanding would be that consumption or ownership of the brand provides social capital in the sense that your popularity increases. The technique McAlister and Cornwell used in their research was designed to be child friendly and, most importantly, a familiar part of the child’s life at that age such as using toys, dolls or snacks and working with a collage. When the method is designed with the child’s culture in mind then the basics of brand symbolism can be detected between 3 and 5 years at the same time as their understanding of others’ minds are beginning to emerge. As the child grows up and gradually acquires an understanding of the different ways others might think, feel or intend to act, then this will open a window to an understanding that using brands in your own ecology of play and sharing food can influence what others think of you. A layer of intangible, social value is available in the brand already.